Why It’s Harder to Make Mom Friends As An Adult (And Small Things That Actually Work)
It’s 8:17 a.m. at preschool drop-off, and I’m standing by the door holding one of my son’s rain boots, the other still on his foot, while he tries to yank it off to run inside and play at the playdough table. A woman next to me is doing the exact same thing with her daughter, her coffee tumbler sticking out of her oversized diaper bag, a half-crumpled permission slip peeking out the top. I make eye contact, huff a laugh. “Rain boots are the worst, right?” I say. She nods, grinning. “Mine refuses to keep them on for more than 10 minutes any day it’s not actually raining.” Just then, my son yanks his boot free and takes off toward the classroom, and she waves and follows her daughter, and that’s it. No exchange of numbers. No “we should get coffee sometime.” Just two people in the same messy boat, passing like ships in the 10-minute drop-off window.
I remember when I had my first kid seven years ago, I moved to this town and didn’t know anyone. I joined a neighborhood mom group on Facebook, and every Wednesday a handful of us would meet at the old coffee shop downtown. We’d sit for two hours, our babies napping in their car seats next to the table, complain about postpartum recovery and how our husbands left their socks on the bathroom floor. I left that group with two close friends I still talk to every week. When I had my second kid three years later, I tried the same thing. The Facebook group now is 90% lost cat posts and arguments about whether the city should put a new basketball court at the park, and no one’s organized a casual coffee meetup in two years. The library cut their new mom programming budget after the pandemic, so the weekly new mom group is now once a month, and it’s mostly a talk with a lactation consultant that ends 15 minutes early so everyone can rush to their next appointment.
Last month, I went to a mom’s night out at a wine bar a woman invited me to from my son’s soccer team. There were four of us, all with kids the same age. We spent the first 20 minutes scrolling through our phones to show each other our kids’ latest goal highlights, then talked about how much grocery prices have gone up, then everyone checked their babysitter texts, and by 9 p.m. we were all heading out, because babysitters charge an extra $1 an hour after 9, and none of us wanted to pay that. No one suggested doing it again.
I’ve thought a lot about why this feels so much harder now than it did even 10 years ago, when I was a new mom. It’s not just that we’re all busier, though that’s true. It’s that we don’t have that unstructured shared time we used to have when we were younger. Before kids, we made friends from living in dorms, or working 9 to 5 in the same office, or taking the same bus every day. We got to talk to people for 10 minutes here, 10 minutes there, over and over, without having to schedule it. Now, most of our interactions with other moms are 10-minute drop offs, or hour-long birthday parties where everyone’s running after their kid. You don’t get that slow, casual time to figure out if you actually like someone. After the pandemic, a lot of us also got used to sticking to smaller circles, and it feels harder to put yourself out there now than it did before.
I stopped trying to force big organized groups a while back, and I started testing small, low-pressure moves that actually work. Instead of the vague “we should get coffee sometime” that no one ever follows up on, I started saying, “I’m getting ice cream with my kids after drop off this Friday, wanna come?” It’s already planned, it doesn’t require anyone to clear their schedule two weeks out, and it’s messy enough that no one expects you to be perfectly put together. I said that to the rain boot mom a few weeks after that drop off, and she said yes. We sat on a park bench while our kids ran around the playground, covered in vanilla ice cream, and found out we both hate folding laundry and both have husbands that travel for work once a month. I got her number after that, and it’s been nice.
Another thing that works for me is joining a low-commitment activity that meets the same time every week, no required participation. I got a tiny community garden plot last year, and I go on Saturday mornings for an hour to pull weeds. There’s three other moms that go the same time, and we don’t have to make small talk the whole time. We talk when we want to, we pull weeds when we don’t, and our kids run around picking strawberries from the extra patch. One of those moms I now get tacos with once a month, and that came from just showing up to the same place at the same time every week, no pressure.
I also stopped expecting every mom friend to be my new ride-or-die. I used to think I needed a whole group of best friends that I text every day, like I had in college. Now I’m fine with having a park friend I only see every Friday after drop off, or a garden friend I only see on Saturday mornings. You don’t need to be everything to each other to be friends.
Last week, the rain boot mom and I stood next to each other at the preschool bake sale, folding napkins and selling cookies for an hour. We complained about the PTA asking for three different sign-ups in one week, and made plans to get coffee after spring break, when both our kids are done with their soccer tournaments. It’s not the fast, close friendship I had when I was 22. It takes months to make plans, and some weeks we don’t talk at all. It’s still harder to make mom friends as an adult than it is for kids, or than it was for us before kids. But I’ve stopped looking for the big, perfect group. I just keep showing up to the small stuff, and sometimes that turns into something that fits just right.
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